Three Empirical Essays on Investment in Physical and Human Capital

Three Empirical Essays on Investment in Physical and Human Capital PDF Author: Crawford Hoyt Bleakley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three independent essays, all of which are empirical treatments of different types of investment. The first essay evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the American South in the early twentieth century. I find that reducing hookworm infection in this region brought about large increases in human capital and earnings. I then place these results in the context of contemporaneous questions about the economic burden of tropical disease. The second essay (joint with Kevin Cowan) examines the role that partial dollarization of debt may have played in recent emerging-market financial crises. Much has been written recently about the problems that result from "mismatches" between foreign-currency denominated liabilities and assets (or income flows) denominated in local currency. Specifically, it is supposed that the expansion in the "peso" value of "dollar" liabilities resulting from a devaluation could, via a net-worth effect, offset the expansionary competitiveness effect. Our results suggest that, for this sample of firms in these episodes, this net-worth channel is likely small in comparison with the more traditional competitiveness effect. The final essay (joint with Aimee Chin) considers the role that English-language skill plays in the economic performance of immigrants to the United States. This study exploits the fact that younger children tend to learn languages more easily than adolescents or adults to construct an instrumental variable for English proficiency. We find that low English proficiency significantly lowers earnings and educational attainment. Indeed, much of the effect of language skills on wages in our sample appears to be mediated by years of schooling.

Three Empirical Essays on Investment in Physical and Human Capital

Three Empirical Essays on Investment in Physical and Human Capital PDF Author: Crawford Hoyt Bleakley
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Get Book Here

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three independent essays, all of which are empirical treatments of different types of investment. The first essay evaluates the economic consequences of the successful eradication of hookworm disease from the American South in the early twentieth century. I find that reducing hookworm infection in this region brought about large increases in human capital and earnings. I then place these results in the context of contemporaneous questions about the economic burden of tropical disease. The second essay (joint with Kevin Cowan) examines the role that partial dollarization of debt may have played in recent emerging-market financial crises. Much has been written recently about the problems that result from "mismatches" between foreign-currency denominated liabilities and assets (or income flows) denominated in local currency. Specifically, it is supposed that the expansion in the "peso" value of "dollar" liabilities resulting from a devaluation could, via a net-worth effect, offset the expansionary competitiveness effect. Our results suggest that, for this sample of firms in these episodes, this net-worth channel is likely small in comparison with the more traditional competitiveness effect. The final essay (joint with Aimee Chin) considers the role that English-language skill plays in the economic performance of immigrants to the United States. This study exploits the fact that younger children tend to learn languages more easily than adolescents or adults to construct an instrumental variable for English proficiency. We find that low English proficiency significantly lowers earnings and educational attainment. Indeed, much of the effect of language skills on wages in our sample appears to be mediated by years of schooling.

Health and Human Capital Investments

Health and Human Capital Investments PDF Author: Nina Schwarz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Empirical Essays on Human Capital Investments in Health and Education

Empirical Essays on Human Capital Investments in Health and Education PDF Author: Anastasia Driva
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description


Empirical Essays in Health and Human Capital

Empirical Essays in Health and Human Capital PDF Author: Gary Brant Morefield
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This dissertation studies two dynamic processes, the production of human capital and evolution of health. The first essay uses data on parents and their children in the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics and PSID-Child Development Supplement to estimate the effect negative changes in parental health on the children's development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The analysis suggests that the onset of a parental health event, on average, does not affect children's cognitive measures and has small negative effects on the level of children's noncognitive skills. However, small average effects mask heterogeneous effects across: the sex of the parent, sex of the child, and the type of health condition. Parental health events are found to significantly impair noncognitive skill development when a father is afflicted with a health event, affect sons more negatively than daughters, and are worse for certain--vascular or cancerous--conditions. Further exploration shows that effects of parental health events on skill development are related to changes in the hypothesized mechanism, changes in skill investments. Specifically, when parental health events are estimated to create the poorest behavior outcomes, large reductions in one measure of skill investment, time that parents participate in activities with children, is also commonly found. The second essay (joint with David Ribar and Christopher Ruhm) uses longitudinal data from the 1984 through 2007 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how occupational status is related to the health transitions of 30 to 59 year-old U.S. males. A recent history of blue-collar employment predicts a substantial increase in the probability of transitioning from very good into bad self-assessed health, relative to white-collar employment, but with no evidence of occupational differences in movements from bad to very good health. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity analyses. The results suggest that blue-collar workers "wear out" faster with age because they are more likely, than their white-collar counterparts, to experience negative health shocks. This partly reflects differences in the physical demands of blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The third essay (joint with Jeremy Bray) uses the framework of Bray (2005) to develop a theoretical and accompanying empirical model examining how the productivities of the human capital inputs work and school are affected if individuals work while enrolled in school. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we model the dynamic processes of work and school input decisions jointly with the effects of these decisions on future wages to discern whether work and school are contemporaneous complements or substitutes in the production of human capital. Endogeneity is corrected through the use of the Discrete Factor Method. The model shows that, on average, work and school are indeed complementary in the production of human capital. However, examination of in-school work at differing schooling levels or across different student occupations shows that certain types of work and school are complementary when simultaneously undertaken while others are substitutes in the production of human capital."--Abstract from author supplied metadata.

Human Capital

Human Capital PDF Author: Gary S. Becker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226041220
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Get Book Here

Book Description
Human Capital is Becker's classic study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Recipient of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Economic Science, Gary S. Becker is a pioneer of applying economic analysis to human behavior in such areas as discrimination, marriage, family relations, and education. Becker's research on human capital was considered by the Nobel committee to be his most noteworthy contribution to economics. This expanded edition includes four new chapters, covering recent ideas about human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labor, economic considerations within the family, and inequality in earnings. "Critics have charged that Mr. Becker's style of thinking reduces humans to economic entities. Nothing could be further from the truth. Mr. Becker gives people credit for having the power to reason and seek out their own best destiny."—Wall Street Journal

Three Essays on Investment in Human Capital

Three Essays on Investment in Human Capital PDF Author: Shah Danyal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Human capital
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description


Three Essays on Human Capital

Three Essays on Human Capital PDF Author: Xiaoyan Chen Youderian
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first essay considers how the timing of government education spending influences the intergenerational persistence of income. We build a life-cycle model where human capital is accumulated in early and late childhood. Both families and the government can increase the human capital of young agents by investing in education at each stage of childhood. Ability in each dynasty follows a stochastic process. Different abilities and resultant spending histories generate a stochastic steady state distribution of income. We calibrate our model to match aggregate statistics in terms of education expenditures, income persistence and inequality. We show that increasing government spending in early childhood education is effective in lowering intergenerational earnings elasticity. An increase in government funding of early childhood education equivalent to 0.8 percent of GDP reduces income persistence by 8.4 percent. We find that this relatively large effect is due to the weakening relationship between family income and education investment. Since this link is already weak in late childhood, allocating more public resources to late childhood education does not improve the intergenerational mobility of economic status. Furthermore, focusing more on late childhood may raise intergenerational persistence by amplifying the gap in human capital developed in early childhood. The second essay considers parental time investment in early childhood as an education input and explores the impact of early education policies on labor supply and human capital. I develop a five-period overlapping generations model where human capital formation is a multi-stage process. An agent's human capital is accumulated through early and late childhood. Parents make income and time allocation decisions in response to government expenditures and parental leave policies. The model is calibrated to the U.S. economy so that the generated data matches the Gini index and parental participation in education expenditures. The general equilibrium environment shows that subsidizing private education spending and adopting paid parental leave are both effective at increasing human capital. These two policies give parents incentives to increase physical and time investment, respectively. Labor supply decreases due to the introduction of paid parental leave as intended. In addition, low-wage earners are most responsive to parental leave by working less and spending more time with children. The third essay is on the motherhood wage penalty. There is substantial evidence that women with children bear a wage penalty of 5 to 10 percent due to their motherhood status. This wage gap is usually estimated by comparing the wages of working mothers to childless women after controlling for human capital and individual characteristics. This method runs into the problem of selection bias by excluding non-working women. This paper addresses the issue in two ways. First, I develop a simple model of fertility and labor participation decisions to examine the relationships among fertility, employment, and wages. The model implies that mothers face different reservation wages due to variance in preference over child care, while non-mothers face the same reservation wage. Thus, a mother with a relatively high wage may choose not to work because of her strong preference for time with children. In contrast, a childless woman who is not working must face a relatively low wage. For this reason, empirical analysis that focuses only on employed women may result in a biased estimate of the motherhood wage penalty. Second, to test the predictions of the model, I use 2004-2009 data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) and include non-working women in the two-stage Heckman selection model. The empirical results from OLS and the fixed effects model are consistent with the findings in previous studies. However, the child penalty becomes smaller and insignificant after non-working women are included. It implies that the observed wage gap in the labor market appears to overstate the child wage penalty due to the sample selection bias.

Empirical Essays on Health and Human Capital

Empirical Essays on Health and Human Capital PDF Author: Thomas Eriksson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789174735918
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 109

Get Book Here

Book Description


Human Capital

Human Capital PDF Author: Gary S. Becker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780226041209
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 390

Get Book Here

Book Description
Human Capital is Becker's study of how investment in an individual's education and training is similar to business investments in equipment. Becker looks at the effects of investment in education on earnings and employment, and shows how his theory measures the incentive for such investment, as well as the costs and returns from college and high school education. Another part of the study explores the relation between age and earnings. This edition includes four new chapters, covering recent ideas about human capital, fertility and economic growth, the division of labour, economic considerations within the family, and inequality in earnings.

Studies in Human Capital

Studies in Human Capital PDF Author: Jacob Mincer
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 9781782541554
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book Here

Book Description
'The books should. . . . be bought by every university library. The research reported here is important, the exposition is lucid, the sequencing of chapters is sensible and the retrospective aspect of the volumes provides a fascinating insight into the working methods of one of the great economists of our time.' - Geraint Johnes, International Journal of Manpower Studies in Human Capital, the first volume of Jacob Mincer's essays to be published in this series, assesses the impact of education and job training on wage growth. It offers an authoritative study of the effects of human capital investments on labor turnover and the impact of technological change on human capital formation.